Design thinking is a human-centered problem-solving methodology structured around an iterative five-stage loop of empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. It was popularized by IDEO (David Kelley, 1991) and the Stanford d.school (2005), and is applied to product, service, organizational, and policy problems well beyond traditional product design. It is one of the most influential methodologies in modern innovation work and also one of the most-critiqued, with serious questions raised about whether the workshop-heavy version delivers durable outcomes.
The five stages, as taught at the d.school: empathize (deep customer research, often ethnographic, to understand the human at the center of the problem), define (synthesi...
Dissolution is the legal process of formally winding up and ending a corporation or LLC. It includes settling outstanding debts, terminating contracts, distributing any remaining assets to owners per the liquidation waterfall, filing final federal and state tax returns, terminating registrations in qualified states, and filing dissolution paperwork (Certificate of Dissolution in Delaware) with the Secretary of State. It is the cleanup process founders most consistently skip when a startup winds down, creating tax and compliance debt that catches up to them years later.
The major steps in a typical Delaware C-corp dissolution: board approval (board resolution to dissolve), shareholder approval (typically majority shareholder vote...
Product management is the discipline of guiding a product from idea to market through ongoing iteration, sitting at the intersection of business, design, and engineering. It balances what's worth building (business), what users need (design), and what's possible to build (engineering). It is owned by a role (the product manager) responsible for the outcomes the product delivers rather than the outputs the team ships. It is one of the most over-titled and under-defined roles in modern tech, with the actual job varying widely by company stage and product type.
The canonical model, popularized by Marty Cagan in Inspired (first edition 2008, third 2017), describes product management as the three-legged stool of value (will cu...
Product discovery is the practice of validating problems, opportunities, and solutions with customers and data before committing engineering effort to build them. It is distinguished from product delivery (the act of designing, building, and shipping) and aimed at killing bad ideas cheaply so the team only builds things likely to drive the intended outcome. It is the front half of modern product work, and the part most under-invested in by startups that mistake speed of shipping for speed of learning.
The discipline was popularized in its modern form by Marty Cagan, especially in Inspired (2008/2017) and Empowered (2020), with the core argument that great product teams discover what to build before they decide to build it,...
Continuous discovery is the practice of conducting weekly customer touchpoints by the product trio (PM, designer, engineer) to inform ongoing product decisions. It was popularized by Teresa Torres in Continuous Discovery Habits (2021) and is structured around mapping desired outcomes to opportunities to solutions to assumption tests, rather than running discovery in concentrated batches separate from delivery. It is the operational evolution of Marty Cagan's product-discovery framing, focused on making customer evidence a weekly rhythm rather than a project.
The core practices Torres specifies: weekly customer touchpoints (at minimum, a 30-minute conversation with a real customer each week, by the whole trio, not just t...
User research is the practice of generating evidence about user needs, behaviors, and pain points through systematic methods, then synthesizing that evidence into actionable insights. Methods include interviews, observation, surveys, usability testing, diary studies, and analytics, and the output informs product, design, and marketing decisions. It is the input layer underneath product discovery, UX work, value proposition development, and most credible go-to-market positioning.
The discipline splits along two axes that matter. The qualitative versus quantitative axis: qualitative research (interviews, observation, usability tests) tells you why users do what they do and is best run in small N with rich detail; quantitative re...
A design sprint is a five-day process for solving big product problems through ideation, rapid prototyping, and real-user testing in a single compressed week. It was developed at Google Ventures by Jake Knapp and is designed to bypass the usual months of debate and produce a validated direction before the company commits to building. It was popularized through Knapp's book Sprint (2016, co-authored with John Zeratsky and Braden Kowitz) and became one of the most-adopted structured product processes in the late 2010s.
The classical five-day schedule: Monday, understand (map the problem, interview experts, choose a focus area), Tuesday, sketch (each participant generates solutions individually, leading to a detailed solution ske...
Vertical analysis is the systematic study of a specific industry vertical's needs, dynamics, buying patterns, regulatory environment, competitive landscape, and unit economics. It's used to inform vertical-specific go-to-market strategy at companies that focus on (or are evaluating focus on) particular industry verticals (healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, education). The discipline is especially important at vertical SaaS companies and at horizontal SaaS companies evaluating vertical expansion or vertical-specific product investments. Vertical analysis is industry analysis applied to a specific industry slice rather than the whole economy.
The dimensions to analyze:
Vertical-specific needs:
Closing conditions are the contractual requirements that must be satisfied before a financing transaction actually closes and funds are released. Across venture rounds, M&A deals, and public offerings, these typically include regulatory approvals where required, the absence of any material adverse change (MAC) since signing, customary closing deliverables (legal opinions, officer certificates, secretary certificates), certificate-of-incorporation amendments being filed and effective, and all transaction documents being signed by required parties. In venture financing specifically, closing conditions are usually limited to mechanical items but can become contentious in larger or distressed rounds.
The standard closing...
Corporate formalities are the procedural and documentation requirements that maintain the legal separation between a corporation or LLC and its owners. The category covers regular board meetings with minutes, annual shareholder meetings, proper resolutions for major decisions, separation of business and personal finances, accurate corporate records, and timely state filings. Failing to maintain them lets courts "pierce the corporate veil" and hold owners personally liable for business debts and obligations. They are the boring administrative work that most founders skip and the lever courts use to invalidate the limited-liability protection that was the whole point of forming the entity.
The major categories of corpora...